A high school teacher recently sent me an email asking for advice on the best
path to move from the BASIC Stamp 1 (BS1) module to Microchip PICs. He had
his students programming the BS1 Project Board (Figure 1) which is a very nice
board for the price. He was happy with that board as an entry point, but the next
step in the BASIC Stamp world was moving to the BS2 Homework Board, which is
a $45 development board. He hoped to keep it below $25. He thought maybe
programming a PIC microcontroller directly might be the best option since the
BS1 is based on that same family of microcontroller ...

With all the various
programmers, tools, and
compiler options though, he
was getting confused. He wanted to
be able to program blank PICs, not
another company’s chip where you
have to buy from a limited number of
sources. This ruled out the Basic
Atom, the PICAXE, and a few others.
What I hope to show you in this
article is the same thing we
emonstrated to the high school.
You can put together a great starter
package for under $25 using mostly
free samples and free downloads
from the Internet.

Requirements

The BS1 has an 80 command
limit, but the high school teacher
stated that many of the projects his
students worked on were very simple
and didn’t require a lot of code space.
On the other hand, he wanted an
upgrade path to offer more space and
definitely more speed to his advanced
students. He also wanted to be able
to access the PIC’s built-in features

such as A/D and timers. As a simpletest, he asked if we could recommenda package and offer a simple examplefor driving an LCD module as a basicdemonstration. This took many linesof code in the BS1, so he either neededto use an expensive serial LCD moduleor move up to a larger part like theBS2 to do more with it. He stated thathe’d seen sample code with a singleLCD control command that simplifieddriving an LCD and wondered if thePIC had that option built in. That wasthe challenge he placed before me.Based on these requirements, Itold him that we could show himan LCD example with very littleeffort, using a BASIC compilerthat will easily convert over hisexisting code and offer an easyupgrade path to full professionalPIC programming for hisstudents down the road. Hewas very interested so he wantedmore detail.